If Alice behind me had not been too big to squeeze in, I felt she would have crawled in after me to talk me out.
Even so, in that short while, though it was not a great amount, I had found a double handful of metal fragments.
It was strange.
On the walls, on the ceiling, even around that hole in the ceiling, they looked like a single sheet, similar to iron plating.
But the fragments on the floor were all small pieces, like shards of glass.
They were a little sharp.
Even through my clothes I could feel them pricking, a little painful.
When I crawled out from behind the surgical pod, Alice reached out, caught my hand, and helped me up.
Still wearing a smile, she said, “Not that easy to find, is it?”
“Mm… true. This is all I found.”
She followed my gaze to my clothes.
I had basically picked up every piece of Origin Gold on the floor that I could, but it was only this one lapful.
When Alice saw the Origin Gold fragments gathered in my clothes, she jerked her hands up in front of her face and took a step back, as if she had been startled, and only came back to herself after a long moment.
“Is this real…”
“We’ve struck it rich.”
We really had struck it rich.
That lapful of Origin Gold fragments Alice insisted on kneeling on the floor and checking piece by piece for a long time.
In the end, she confirmed that they were all Origin Gold.
“If they were fake, this metal would look far too much like Origin Gold. That shouldn’t be very likely…”
Of course, as someone who knew the truth, who knew that even the floor she was kneeling on was so-called Origin Gold, I could not share Alice’s feeling.
But I knew she was happy.
That’s wonderful, Alice. We’ve struck it rich.
“With these, we won’t have to live on dry bread anymore. We can even go to the lord’s city, buy a house to live in, then find work in the city and start a life there.”
“I-is that so…?” It had suddenly become very practical.
“To verify whether these really are Origin Gold, and since Yulin-chan needs invisibility magic anyway, there’s no time to lose. Let’s try it…
“Ah!”
“Hm…?” To be honest, Alice’s turns sometimes felt a little fast for me.
At the very least, I still had a hard time getting used to her sudden “Ah!” like that.
“Yulin-chan! My wand! My wand! I lost it!”
Well… that was true…
People themselves had been eaten, and their skin had been all but digested.
How could anything they had been carrying still be there…
It was not only Alice’s wand.
Because Alice’s original robe had long since turned to water in the fish monster’s stomach, we could not even eat dry bread anymore.
She had nearly started turning her underwear inside out to look.
When Alice confirmed that we had lost every last personal item, she dropped straight to her knees. “Uu… Yulin-chan, we’re stranded.”
Have we… not been in a stranded state this whole time…?
For this journey, Alice had spent almost all the savings she had gathered since childhood to buy the warehouse crystal she kept in her robe.
I did not know the principle, but it was probably something that used magic fixed to the crystal to shrink objects and store them in the space inside.
A must-have for every traveler.
But it had already become part of the fish monster’s stomach acid along with the ruined robe, and the wand needed no mention.
“Uu… I lost my wand, I lost the luggage, what do we do, Yulin-chan… We’re going to die here…” The reliable-big-sister image from before was gone.
Once she decided we had lost the wand and the luggage, Alice knelt on the floor and cried so hard she could barely get the words out.
I lifted my head and looked around, though.
This was still Eden, after all.
I thought — the food problem should not be hard to solve.
I turned to look at the metal case I had brought back from the factory.
At the AI’s reminder, I had already taken out the [Aether Origin Factor] canister once used in the surgical pod and put it into the case.
The case, just as it looked from the outside, was only an ordinary case when opened.
Apart from the sections sealed in metal at both ends, which were completely unknown, the main body of the case — was just an empty box.
If there was anything special about it, it was that if you put something in, it would automatically generate shock-absorbing foam that fit just well enough to protect the contents.
Other than that — mm, no matter how you looked at it, it was just a box.
[Portable Construction Unit].
If I remembered correctly, that was its official name.
And if I had understood correctly, it ought to be usable for producing certain things.
“Can it manufacture a wand and a [Storage Crystal]?” I said it as if talking to myself.
As expected, the AI in my mind issued a prompt. [“Searching… Apologies. The offline library lacks materials related to wands and [Storage Crystals]. Matches: 0.”]
[“Miss Yulin, based on my inference, you appear to want to print a device capable of invoking psionics.”]
[“Upon inspection, this unit possesses a psionic engraving module and is capable of printing devices or tools with such functions.”]
[“However, this module lacks the relevant drivers. It is presently unable to obtain psionics from the Halo, or to relay psionics, or to obtain the relevant mathematical models. Therefore, you are temporarily unable to print or produce related devices or tools.”]
What… did that mean…?
Did it mean that although this metal case had the ability to make magic-related tools, it could not make them for the time being because it lacked the relevant drivers?
“Mm…”
“Mm…” Almost at the same time, Alice and I both let out a mm.
When I came back to myself from the HUD prompt, Alice had already stopped crying and was only looking up at me. “Yulin-chan…”
“What is it?” I looked down at her, still sitting on the floor, and let out a quiet sigh.
“We might not be able to buy a house… My wand was wrapped in the basket with me when the priest found me, so that is why I have one…
“There were never many people in the village who could use magic smoothly with a wand. Almost all of them inherited theirs from the older generation.
“If we want to go buy one, we would have to give up buying a house in the city…”
“That doesn’t really matter… But can you buy one?” So wands were that precious?
To be honest, I was a little surprised.
Alice still looked very hesitant.
She closed her hands into fists and set them against her chest, and only after a long silence went on.
“We can. We can buy one… But this Origin Gold is what Yulin-chan found. I can’t just use it as I please.”
Buying… buying a house would be fine?
But looking at her so downcast, I could only smile a little.
I bent down, reached out, and patted her head. “It’s all right. I bear some of the responsibility for the wand being lost too. Let’s just buy a new one.”
“Yulin-chan isn’t responsible.
“It’s all my own fault. I am always so careless. I didn’t take proper care of it.” Hearing me say that, Alice hurried to answer.
“In a situation like that, no matter how carefully you kept it, it would have been hard not to lose it. Whether it was flooding the ruin, or going to pick up fish, or getting attacked by the fish monster in the end. Those were all things we did together. So… it’s all right. If we hadn’t done those things together, we wouldn’t have come here, and we wouldn’t have found this Origin Gold.”
“So of course I, as an accomplice, bear responsibility too.”
“It’s all right. Let’s go to the city and buy a new one. I haven’t even been to a place where people live yet.”
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